California Know-how Helps Improve The Wines Of Chile

THE WINE COLUMN

A good example is Calina, the Chilean winemaking effort begun in 1993 by Jess Jackson, founder of California's Kendall-Jackson winery. As prices for California's top wines continue to soar - the K.J. Grand Reserve Cab is $65 a bottle, the Cafaro Cab is $75 - Calina today is shipping approachable wines at $9 to $20. It's good marketing. If K.J.'s top reds are priced out of the reach of the everyday U.S. wine aficionado, its Chilean reds will still bring in the dollars spent by more modest wine buyers.

And California, whose own major industry explosion is less than 40 years old, is using the lessons it has learned to improve the quality of Chilean wine even faster.

``I compare some areas of Chile to the Napa Valley in 1965,'' says Calina winemaker Don Baker. ``The elements of quality have always been there. We're bringing the knowledge, technology and money.'' As California winemakers have arrived in Chile over the past six to eight years, they have found fabulous and familiar conditions. Jackson refers to Chile as ``California upside down,'' pointing out that it is about as far south as California is north, has similar coastal and inland mountain chains with vineyards cooled at night by Pacific fogs.

But they also found a lack of modern equipment and expertise, with too many grapes grown in the hot and fertile central valley instead of in cooler areas and the poor soil of mountainsides, which produce better wines.

Calina's first move was to persuade growers to use modern methods - pruning vines and limiting irrigation to lower grape yields from more than 10 tons per acre to less than six, to concentrate colors and flavors.

``They all thought we were crazy,'' Baker says. ``We had to change their whole mind-set from the ways their grandfathers did it. I asked them, `Do you want $100 today, or $1,000 tomorrow?''' Calina is already using more grapes from Chile's chilly Itata region, 200 miles south of Santiago, the center of most of the country's traditional vineyards.

Jess Jackson entered Chile in 1993, leasing a winery, sending Randy Ullom, his director of international winemaking to scout the territory, buy grapes and produce the first wines - a 1993 cabernet sauvignon and a 1994 chardonnay - under the Vina Calina label. Merlot followed, with all three wines in the $15 to $20 range.

In 1997, the Calina line began, with a chardonnay, merlot and cabernet sauvignon at $9 to $11. In 1998, Jackson hired winemaker Don Baker to oversee both Vina Calina and Calina.

This month construction began on a $10 million, state-of-the art winery scheduled to be ready for the 2000 harvest. After that, all wines will be sold under the Calina label. As Calina expands its growing areas, the wines it exports to the U.S. will change.

``We will stress single-region wines, as they do in Napa and Sonoma,'' says marketing director Irby Wood. ``We have to educate people about Chile's regions, and their different styles.''

With Calina, Baker's philosophy is to make wines that stress Chile's advantages of intense, ripe fruit and soft, approachable tannins. And Calina isn't ready yet to join the rush to produce a $50 Chilean red wine to compete with the top reserves or California or the grand crus of France.

``Let's walk before we run,'' says Baker. ``I firmly believe we can do it but when? Twenty-five years? Fifty? Don't forget, the French wine industry is centuries old. California's is decades. Chile needs some time.''